8 comments:

To wake up from troubled dreams and find this is very, very satisfying. I think I'll try to go back to sleep now. All wonderful but I really, really love the Camel ad. So that's what it was about Camels.

Oh this had put a smile on my morning face. Now the very tired afternoon face has its turn. Too lovely to not smile. Sometimes, especially on such afternoons I cannot help but feel that we are all walking towards a green meadow where there would be plenty of rest for everybody and the wind would be a joy leaping .. like soft ponies with babies on their backs and everybody would smile contentment.

No bother Catanea, I love the simulation of a comment thread in the morning. Wahnderful, wahnderful.

On the subject of advertising and psychology, I would highly recommend a documentary which draws the thread (speaking of threads) all the way back to Sigmund Freud, by way of his American nephew, whose main conquest in the realms of the psyche was making women feel good about smoking.

"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

"Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

"His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

"It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."